Top Quality Programming Team Speaks Out

IRC is a waste of time

Written by Adrian Pavone

For the past year, I have been idling (sitting connected but not doing anything actively) in the #archlinux channel. Originally, I was a newb, asking all sorts of questions about things that I was unsure about (I had previous linux experience, but archlinux has a way of doing things just a little bit different to all the other distros). I then moved on to idling so that I could help other people when they had problems. I then followed the natural progression from that stage to trolling, while still giving the occasional solution to a problem so as not to just be ignored/kicked. Then I moved to giving sureal answers to questions, which was a lot of fun. But finally I got to perma-idling, which is where you sit with the channel window open at all times, just reading what is going on, only occasionally jumping into the conversation.

Now, perma-idling doesn't sound so bad, until you figure out how much time it actually wastes.

When I took a look at what I am managing to get accomplished while perma-idling, it is actually quite frightening. I would waste around three hours of every eight that I am at work just sitting reading or replying to the general conversations, almost always offtopic, despite #archlinux having it's own offtopic channel at #archlinux-offtopic.

Then one day, one of the key members of #archlinux (who was also responsible for phrik, #archlinux's resident bot) had his Power Supply Unit die. phrakture was suddenly no more.

Now, he could easily replace the PSU, but in the time it took him to replace it (a couple of days), the liberation he felt from having to check on irc every few minutes was overwhelming. To quote phrakture himself:

Being ever-present in IRC makes me think "man, I should check my IRC window, maybe something important happened / was said". This is simply not the case. Important things don't happen in IRC.

Reading this is what made me finally wake up and realise that all I am doing is wasting my time on IRC, when I could be doing other things, such as Mastering Perl, practicing my Bass Guitar, getting a girlfriend, or any number of other things.

So I hate to say it, but farewell the #archlinux. Farewell.